OpenDaylight Advances in Post-Hydrogen Era

David Meyer details how the open-source OpenDaylight software defined networking project is now evolving and growing.

OpenDaylight is not going to be a one-hit wonder. It's a project and a technology platform that will continue to evolve. Helping to steer the technical direction of the open-source SDN effort is OpenDaylight Technical Steering Committee Chairman David Meyer, and he remains optimistic and enthusiastic about the project.

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The OpenDaylight project was officially formed just over a year ago, in April of 2013. The first generally available platform from the project, codenamed Hydrogen, came out on February 4 of this year. Work is now progressing on the next platform release, codenamed Helium.

Overall, Meyer said that he continues to be surprised at how deep and wide the community has grown around OpenDaylight. At the beginning of the OpenDaylight effort, some raised concerns that it was a Cisco-dominated effort, but what has happened is that community participation is real and continuing to grow.

The OpenDaylight project is also evolving its processes and the way that the platform is developed.

"The way that projects come into the simultaneous release for OpenDaylight is they go through a lifecycle," Meyer said. "We're not changing that. What we have been trying to do is provide more deterministic scheduling to developers so they can allocate their time more efficiently."

Meyer said that when OpenStack Hydrogen came out, the project didn't have a schedule for the Helium release. For the next release after Helium, codenamed Lithium, there is already a schedule being formed so that developers can do proper planning.

"That's a growth thing, and we're getting better," Meyer said.

Going a step forward, there is also an effort in OpenDaylight known as Root Parent, which is about how to deterministically set up releases such that automated build and regression testing can be enabled.

"Less humans is better," Meyer said. "The OpenDaylight build process has to be highly automated if we're going to be successful."

Increased automation will also be pointed at helping to secure OpenDaylight code. Meyer said there are several code security integrity projects currently forming.

"The more automation, the better off we'll be," Meyer said. "The Heartbleed vulnerability shows us that we all need to spend more time on the security auditing."

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Networking Planet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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